About the Personal Finances Data & CRP's Methodology

Personal financial disclosure forms are filed by May 15 each year, covering the prior calendar year, and are released
to the public 30 days later. The Center for Responsive Politics obtained reports covering the years from 2004 to 2013
for members of Congress from the Senate Office of Public Records and the Office of the Clerk of the House. The
valuation of their assets is as of the last day of the year covered by the report. Newly elected members filed reports
as candidates throughout 2013. The valuation of their assets is as of various dates depending on when they became
candidates. CRP did not collect personal financial data for non-incumbent candidates for federal office who did not
win election; there are simply too many.

For the executive branch, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics provided reports for the president, vice president,
presidential Cabinet and other select officials. Judicial filings were obtained from the Judicial Conference of the U.S.
After downloading images of reports and in some cases electronically scanning paper reports into digital images, the
information was captured via data entry and verified.

The "Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012," or STOCK Act, was signed into law in April, 2012, and
improves disclosure of personal finances in several important ways. Filings are now posted on the web, transactions
will be reported every 30-45 days instead of annually, the terms of home mortgages -- previously exempted -- will be
disclosed. Read more about the STOCK Act here.

Filers are required to include much of the same information about their spouses that they must disclose about their
own finances and activities, though often less specificity is allowed. Assets, liabilities, income, transactions, gifts, and
travel reimbursements of spouses and dependent children are included in these disclosures and, therefore, are used
in our industry and net worth calculations. Some filers attach account statements or other additional material as a
supplement or replacement for the standard forms. When new or more detailed information was available in these
attachments, it was entered as well.

Once the database was populated, the names of assets, liabilities and transactions, as well as sources of income,
gifts, travel reimbursements, outside positions and agreements, were standardized and, when appropriate,
categorized according to industry.

Assets were also coded according to type of investment, allowing them to be identified, where possible, as stocks,
bonds, mutual funds, etc. When an industry code was not appropriate, as with diversified mutual funds and items
such as cash accounts, those figures were excluded from industry profiles.

Net worth was calculated by summing the filer's assets and then subtracting any listed liabilities. Filers report the
amount of each of their assets, transactions and liabilities as falling within one of several ranges. The minimum
possible values for each asset were added together as were the maximum possible values. Likewise, minimum and
maximum liability amounts were summed. The maximum debt figure was then subtracted from the minimum asset
figure and the minimum debt figure was subtracted from the maximum asset figure. The resulting range represents
the extremes of how much a filer could be worth, and his or her actual net worth should fall somewhere within that
range. The midpoint or average of the two limits was also calculated and used for purposes of ranking the filers by
wealth. Using the average for these rankings avoids much of the distortion caused when a filer is highly leveraged.
Due to the various ranges reported on the forms, filers with high liability totals as well as high asset totals could
find themselves deep in the red and ranked accordingly low if the minimum possible net worth is used even if the
lawmaker is widely regarded as one of the wealthiest members of Congress. All three figures are displayed for
reference, but the use of the average paints a picture that much more accurately reflects reality. The top range
of "Over $50 million" limits valuation of very large assets. Additionally, Senate forms allow spousal assets to be
categorized as "Over $1 million." When further disclosure or research definitively revealed a more accurate figure, it
was used in place of the range.

Top Assets were determined by adding the minimum and maximum value ranges for a given asset for all filers that
held it. For example, if three filers each reported holding Microsoft stock worth between $1,001 and $5,000, the total
holding of Microsoft would be listed as $3,003 to $15,000.

Note that the ethics law does not require filers to report property, including personal residences, that is not held
for investment purposes and does not produce income. The STOCK Act requires that the terms of all mortgages,
including those on non-income producing personal residences, be disclosed. Mortgages reported on properties
that were not listed as assets were excluded from the wealth calculations, but are displayed on our profiles of the
corresponding officials. Even though they weren't required to do so, some filers did list the value of their personal
residences; when they did, we included the information in our totals and detailed listings. Filers are required to report
detailed listings and values of holdings that underlie an account. They occasionally also report the combined value of
the account, in which case the combined value is omitted from calculations.

What is missing from these disclosures?

While the Center makes every effort to accurately estimate net worth based on the contents of these filings, there are
several shortcomings in the disclosure rules that can affect those estimates. Even though some types of assets are
not required to be disclosed, some filers do report them; when they do, we include them.

Personal residences that do not produce income are not reported. Other personal property, such as cars
and artwork, is not reported unless it is owned for investment purposes.

Retirement accounts from employment with the federal government are not reported.

Two ranges of asset value have no upper limit. Large assets in the name of and under the direction of a
filer's spouse can be reported as being worth "Over $1 million" and the uppermost category for all assets is
"Over $50 million." Assets reported in these categories could be worth any amount, including hundreds of
millions of dollars.

Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics. For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center.

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